Page 55 of Taipei Story

The Harvard mother sat slouched in the row before me, her cheek pressed against the window. Her husband asked her where she wanted to do dinner, and she snapped that she didn’t know, that he could do some trip planning for once.

“You have to take lessons,” she told her sons. “Ask that girl about her program.”

“Okay, Mom,” said one of the twins.

“No, I want you to actually ask that girl. Her Chinese is so good—ask her right now.”

“Mom,” said the other.

She sat back in her seat, arms folded. Her husband reached for her arm, but she shook him off.

I could have leaned forward and shared what I knew, that I, too, had once been so insecure about my Chinese. I could have told them the exact tuition rates and the summer session dates and the government fellowships that would make it nearly free to attend. I could have even told the mother that there was a private tutoring option too; that she could make a serious study of Mandarin at any time she liked, since she could obviously afford it. But I knew they didn’t want to hear any more from me. This wasn’t my identity crisis to manage.

I FOUND AN INDEPENDENT CINEMA CALLED SPOT IN AN OUTDOOR complex called the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, which was built on the grounds of an old sake distillery. Huashan 1914 was frequented by both gaggles of chain-smoking teenagers buying used records and young parents pushing strollers, browsing through hand-sewn Japanese handbags. Whoever curated films for SPOT seemed to screen things with equal interest across release dates, regions, and genres. There was no theme; it could be Italian neorealism one day and Hong Kong martial arts cinema the next. I began purchasing tickets to whatever film was showing that afternoon. I wanted to find out what the Taiwanese cinephiles were into.

I ended up watching a series of three films by Ryusuke Hamaguchi: Like Nothing Happened, Passion, and I Love Thee for Good. Hamaguchi’s films were all about how men and women want to sleep together, but things keep getting in the way. Passion was my favorite. It was about a group of friends reuniting after college, trying to sort through their old sexual entanglements by asking each other dirty, loaded questions. They can’t refuse to answer any questions—they have to be totally transparent. This reminded me of many dormitory parties I’d attended over the last year. We’d often played a game called Hot Seat, in which the person in the Hot Seat had to answer truthfully every question posed to them over the next sixty seconds. The questions usually had to do with whom they had slept with, or wanted to sleep with, or disliked for sleeping with someone that they wanted to sleep with. But you could never get a straight answer out of the person in the Hot Seat, no matter how specifically you worded your questions. It was the same in Hamaguchi’s Passion. Everyone was horny but exhausted, speaking in codes, trying to communicate to just a single person that they were interested, but in a veiled way, so they wouldn’t think they were too interested.

Why was it so hard to speak plainly? What would happen if they said outright, I want to sleep with you? What if I had said to JC, I want to go home?

I found all this strangely reassuring. So not all barriers came from language. You could be perfectly fluent in Japanese and still fail to communicate anything essential. In Passion, there were two characters who talked in circles about their codes of ethics, their disdain for their sluttier friends, and their opposing philosophies on love for nearly two hours, and you got the sense that they despised each other, but then they had a fight in the bathroom, and the guy pushed the girl under the shower and turned it on, and it seemed very violent, and for a moment I was nervous for the girl, but then they started making out. So language could only get you so far. Sometimes you just had to make out fully clothed in the shower.

The only trouble with Hamaguchi’s films was the subtitles. The characters spoke in Japanese, and the screen displayed three sets of subtitles: English, Japanese, and Chinese. I understood a little bit of all three. English I had. Chinese I was getting close. Japanese I had tried to learn in middle school when I underwent my anime phase, and though I had forgotten almost all the complex grammar, the easy bits—sumimasen, arigatou gozaimasu, ganbatte!—were engraved in my brain. I should have just followed along in the English. But I had come into the theater primed to read Chinese, so when I saw the Chinese subtitles, my eyes gravitated there first. Watching a movie in triplicate was no good. All three subtitles conveyed slightly different things. The overall plot was intelligible, but the nuances seemed important. For instance, there was a world of difference between “Never mind” and “You could never possibly understand.”

I COULDN’T TELL IF I WAS GETTING BETTER OR WORSE AT CHINESE, only that my utterances were getting stranger. In my one-on-one class, I had decided to stop trying to contort my thoughts to fit assigned grammar patterns. Instead of answering questions with the straightforward constructions suggested by the textbook, I would manipulate whatever building blocks I had to express whatever I was thinking about at the moment. When I didn’t have a concept, I would talk around it until Teacher Sun figured out what I was trying to say. Teacher Sun asked me if I believed in reincarnation, and I didn’t know how to say “the immortality of the soul,” so I said: “Can a soul come back? What is it coming back from? What is a soul? What is it made out of? Is it memory? Without memory, is a person a person?”

“Aha,” said Teacher Sun. She wrote a phrase on the board: 靈魂不滅. The soul is immortal—literally, the soul does not perish.

THE CITY AND ALL ITS SYMBOLS DIDN’T GIVE ME HEADACHES ANYMORE. I no longer felt any pressure to breach that wall of meaning. I’d gotten comfortable with incomprehension, and I felt this looseness in my bones. All the tendons relaxed in my jaw. I didn’t mind if I couldn’t decipher a street sign or a passing conversation. Perceptions were like clear water running through my mind. They came and went, but nothing stuck. No more of this panicked scramble for meaning. I could hold on to an observation, blink at it, and then let it go.

Teacher Sun taught me a nice phrase: 沈澱—chéndiàn, “to settle.” I looked it up in the dictionary. It was a chemistry term—to settle, to precipitate. Teacher Sun used it to talk about my emotions. She told me she thought I was looking calmer, less distressed these days. She gestured with one hand like a cup, and with the other imitated a spoon swirling a liquid inside. I thought it meant that I was sinking into depression, but she said that settling wasn’t a bad thing. “Water is clearer after the dust has settled,” she said. “It means that you sort out all the bad and dirty things. You just wait, and then slowly, things fall into place.”

I SAW A 1982 FILM CALLED NOMAD BY THE HONG KONG DIRECTOR Patrick Tam. As usual, I had known nothing about the film going in, and for the first hour I thought it was just a romantic comedy about four Hong Kong youths goofing around on an island: Louis, Kathy, Pong, and the improbably named Tomato. But then Kathy’s ex-boyfriend Shinsuke shows up from Japan. You think he’s trying to win Kathy back, but the stakes are higher than that. Shinsuke is being hunted by the Japanese Red Army, a group of communist terrorists from which he defected. Shinsuke tries to get Kathy to hide him, but the Japanese Red Army tracks him down, and then most of the characters wind up dead. A harpoon gun is involved. The moral of the story is that you can’t escape history. You can cut yourself adrift and pretend it has nothing to do with you, but then a terrorist might come along and make your ex-boyfriend do seppuku on the beach.

My grief was not that special. Andrew had had a point, that night in the bar. Ask around and every first-, second-, even third-generation Asian American had a sob story somewhere in the family tree. The booms in migration that landed our parents in the US all had to do with Cold War devastations. Mainlander? Someone got got in the Cultural Revolution. Mainlander in the eighties? Someone was fleeing Beijing after the Tiananmen Square massacre—well, that, or someone got into graduate school. Vietnamese? Saigon fell, and then everyone was piling onto boats. Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian? Forget about it.

History mangled everyone. We weren’t the only ones cursed. And my personal tragedy derived not from the fact that it had happened but the fact that no one had thought to include me in this story—the child’s indignation that this was not all about me.

ANOTHER KLOOK NOTIFICATION FOR A RESERVATION I HAD FORGOTTEN about: a day trip to Yehliu Geopark. I’d also forgotten what Yehliu Geopark was, or why we’d found it interesting enough to book this trip, but I didn’t have anything better to do that weekend.

My driver was Jackie. “Hello!” He seemed not to recognize me. “Just us today?”

The small-group vehicle could fit up to six, but I was the only one who had shown up. It was a day of record-breaking heat, the third consecutive day on which this record had been broken. Probably everyone else had chosen to stay near the AC.

I showed Jackie my reservation code and mentioned I’d been on his Pinglin tea tour.

“Okay, fantastic!” He gave no indication of whether he remembered me or not. He persisted in speaking to me in English, even though I’d been responding in Chinese. “You are traveling alone?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“Taipei is a great place to travel alone. Very safe!”

Jackie put on his Taiwanese pop playlist, and off we went. “Teresa Teng,” he told me, gesturing to the radio. I gathered this was the name of the singer. “You know Teresa Teng? It’s very sad. She died in Thailand, just forty-two.” I asked Jackie how she had died, and he shook his head. “We’ll never know.”

Yehliu Geopark was on a small cape just off the coast of Taiwan’s northern tip. The beach was dotted with dark, lumpy rocks, stretching out of the sand like squiggling worms trying to break free.

“Hoodoo stones,” said Jackie.

I didn’t know this word. “Voodoo?”